Microsoft PowerPoint – How to Dynamically Insert Text from an External File

Converting a PPT to a PDF while maintaining the animation steps is something I too have been looking into for a long while, without finding a satisfactory solution.

That is why I have decided to write an add-in on my own which does exactly this:

• splits the slides at each animation step (being it mouse-triggered or not depends on the user's choice)
• while modifying (adding, deleting, altering) the shapes in the "fragmented slide" according to the animation effects.

If you are interested, I have packaged the add-in in an easy-to-use installer, which adds a toolbar (or tab, if you are using Office 2007) to your PowerPoint. In case you are not satisfied, you can easily remove the add-in using the standard Control Panel "Add/Remove Applications" tool.

You can get PPspliT here. Examples of usage are also provided.

You have a few choices for automating the creation of powerpoint presentations.

• In older versions of powerpoint there's a built in macro recording tool to create visual basic scripts. You can still manually create these scripts to automate viewgraph generation
• In more recent version of MS Office there are much better plugins for c# to create presentations (and other office files) directly from data. Here's an older link to microsoft documentation (2002) but it should give you a good idea of how it's done.